The Case For and Against Buying NuScale Power Right Now

NuScale Power remains the only SMR developer with NRC approval, including its 77-megawatt design approved in May 2025, but the stock is down nearly 70% over the last six months. The key concern is execution and economics: its planned Romania project could cost about $7 billion for roughly 460 MW, and its first project, the Carbon Free Power Project, was canceled due to rising costs. The article frames NuScale as a speculative nuclear-energy play despite its regulatory lead.

Analysis

The market is starting to price SMR less like a regulated option value and more like a capital-intensive project developer with uncertain commercialization timing. That matters because approval is only a gating item, not a monetization event: the value inflection comes when utilities, sovereigns, or hyperscalers sign binding offtake and financing structures, and those are the scarcest pieces in nuclear today. In the near term, the company’s first-mover status may actually compress multiples if every delay is read as proof that the addressable market is smaller than the narrative implied.

The second-order effect is that SMR’s cost structure becomes a comparative weapon for competitors, not a weakness in isolation. If customers anchor on a multi-billion-dollar deployment bill, then technologies with either smaller initial capex, modular sequencing, or clearer cost-down curves can win the “pilot-to-scale” race even without approval today. That creates a real sequencing risk for OKLO and other advanced nuclear names: they can use SMR’s slow conversion cycle as evidence that regulatory certainty is not enough, while suppliers to the sector may benefit regardless of which reactor architecture wins.

The contrarian view is that the selloff may be overstating project failure risk and understating strategic scarcity value. In a world where data-center power demand, grid constraints, and industrial decarbonization are tightening simultaneously, one or two reference contracts could re-rate the entire subsector in months rather than years. But absent a signed customer and credible project finance package, SMR remains a headline-sensitive trading vehicle, not a durable fundamental compounder; the next catalyst is commercial, not technical.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Stay underweight SMR on a 3-6 month horizon; the risk/reward is poor until a financed customer order converts regulatory approval into revenue visibility.
• Use SMR weakness to express a relative-value view: long a basket of nuclear supply-chain beneficiaries vs. short SMR, because vendors and engineering contractors monetize activity without bearing single-project execution risk.
• For higher-risk exposure to advanced nuclear upside, prefer a small, defined-risk call spread in OKLO over outright SMR long; the asymmetric catalyst is a breakthrough customer or regulatory milestone, but volatility is high and timing uncertain.
• Watch for a binding project-finance announcement or utility offtake agreement; if one appears, SMR can re-rate sharply over 1-2 sessions as the market shifts from 'approval story' to 'backlog story.'
• If holding SMR, hedge with short-dated calls or a paired short in a comparable long-duration power/infrastructure name to blunt downside from another delayed commercial launch.